A federal appeals court unanimously reversed a lower court order that freed pro-Palestinian Columbia University activist Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration detention, ruling the district judge never had jurisdiction over the case in the first place.
The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan handed down the decision Tuesday, finding that Vermont-based U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford overstepped his authority when he ordered Mahdawi released on bond roughly two weeks after federal agents arrested the 35-year-old West Bank-born student in April. Crawford had ruled that Mahdawi, a non-citizen, enjoyed the same First Amendment free speech protections as American citizens. The appeals court disagreed, not on the merits of that claim, but on whether Crawford's court had any business hearing it at all.
The panel concluded that Mahdawi's case should have been resolved through the immigration court system, overseen by the Justice Department, before a federal district judge weighed in. That procedural finding effectively strips a legal shortcut that immigration detainees and their lawyers had tried to use to bypass the slower deportation process and win quick release on constitutional grounds.
U.S. Circuit Judge Debra Livingston, writing for the panel, was direct. The Washington Examiner reported her conclusion:
"The district court should not have reached this question because it did not have subject matter jurisdiction over the habeas petition."
Two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by President Trump during his first term. The third was appointed by President George W. Bush. The ruling was unanimous.
Brett Schumate, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, called the decision a win for legal order. He said, as the Examiner reported:
"Big win for the rule of law: The Second Circuit makes clear that habeas can't be used as an end-run around Congress's immigration removal-review scheme."
The appeals court stopped short of backing the Trump administration's broader deportation rationale, that Mahdawi's presence in the United States runs counter to U.S. foreign policy. But it did not need to reach that question. The jurisdictional ruling alone was enough to gut the lower court's order.
Mahdawi was taken into custody in April when he arrived for a scheduled interview related to his U.S. citizenship petition. The Trump administration had placed him and several other non-citizen students in deportation proceedings after they participated in demonstrations against Israel's military campaign in Gaza. The government's position was that their activism, combined with their immigration status, made them deportable on foreign-policy grounds.
Rights groups have argued that rationale amounts to punishing lawful speech. Crawford agreed when he ordered Mahdawi's release on bond, ruling that non-citizens retain First Amendment protections. The appeals court did not dispute that legal principle directly, it simply said Crawford's courtroom was the wrong venue to decide it.
Federal prosecutors also raised a more incendiary allegation. Washington Examiner reporting noted that prosecutors cited claims Mahdawi allegedly told staff at a Vermont gun store during a 2015 visit that he had built modified 9mm submachine guns "to kill Jews." That allegation did not form the basis of the appeals court's jurisdictional ruling, but it surfaced in the government's broader case filings.
The pattern of federal appeals courts reversing lower court rulings in politically charged immigration cases has become a recurring feature of the current legal landscape.
Tuesday's ruling mirrors a decision earlier this year by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia involving Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestinian activist. That divided panel reached the same conclusion: Khalil's claims should have been heard through an appeal of a removal order from immigration court, not through a habeas petition in federal district court.
Khalil spent more than 100 days in immigration detention before a federal judge in New Jersey released him on bond. He has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the 3rd Circuit's conclusion. Whether the high court agrees to take the case could determine whether non-citizens facing deportation on political grounds can seek fast-track relief in federal court, or whether they must grind through the immigration court system first.
The consistency between the 2nd and 3rd Circuit rulings strengthens the government's hand. Two separate appellate courts, covering major East Coast jurisdictions, have now told district judges to stay out of immigration removal disputes until the administrative process runs its course. AP News reported the ruling opens the door to Mahdawi's potential re-arrest and deportation, though the panel did not order him taken back into custody.
The broader fight over how much authority lower courts hold to block or override executive branch enforcement actions continues to play out across the federal judiciary.
Mahdawi himself responded to the decision. AP News reported his statement:
"A grave setback," adding that it would hand the government "the power to intimidate, censor, and punish dissent without meaningful restraint."
Neither the Justice Department nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment on the ruling. An ACLU spokesperson, representing Mahdawi, also had no immediate comment.
The silence from the ACLU is notable. The organization has built much of its recent legal strategy around using habeas petitions to challenge immigration enforcement on First Amendment grounds. Tuesday's ruling does not eliminate that argument permanently, but it forces the fight into immigration courts, a slower, more government-friendly forum where detainees have fewer procedural advantages.
That procedural reality matters. Immigration courts operate under the Justice Department, not the independent federal judiciary. Judges in that system serve as DOJ employees. For a non-citizen trying to argue the government is punishing him for political speech, being forced to make that case inside the government's own court system is a different proposition than making it before a life-tenured federal district judge.
The question of whether federal judges can check executive enforcement power in real time remains one of the sharpest legal disputes of the current administration.
The New York Post reported the ruling may make it harder for non-citizens in immigration detention to quickly seek release on First Amendment grounds. That is the practical bottom line. District judges who might sympathize with a detainee's free-speech claims now face clear appellate precedent telling them to send the case back to immigration court.
For the Trump administration, the ruling validates a legal strategy that relies on channeling politically sensitive deportation cases into the immigration court system, where the government controls the pace and the forum. The administration did not win on its most aggressive argument, that foreign-policy concerns alone justify deportation of lawful non-citizens. But it won on the procedural question that matters most in the short term: who gets to decide, and where.
Mahdawi remains free for now. The panel did not order his re-arrest. But with the lower court's protective ruling erased, the government can move to detain him again through the immigration system whenever it chooses.
The case now joins the Khalil petition headed toward the Supreme Court. If the justices decline to intervene, the appellate consensus holds, and appellate courts will have confirmed that the immigration system, not sympathetic district judges, is where these fights get resolved.
Congress built the immigration court system for a reason. When activist judges try to route around it, appeals courts exist to send the case back where it belongs. That is not a setback for dissent, it is the law working as designed.